We now have a fleet of native arm builders in production. They are still in beta testing so to use them you’ll need to push to the ‘master-arm’ on your applications remote:

git push resin master:master-arm

What this means is essentially faster and more reliable builds. This is because we won’t run your build in an emulator (QEMU) which has a series of known bugs which cause the build to occasionally hang. You may have encountered this when trying to do a git clone or install specific dependencies.

Again I must mention that these builders are still being tested, so they may fail extremely ungracefully at times. But I thought you may like to give them a test run before the official release.

Tried it out with node/wiring-pi which uses node-gyp, since the blog mentioned compilation is the big difference. So far so good. QEMU is quicker for the image pull/upload, but the difference is not that big after doing it both ways a couple of times. Cheers!

Thanks for the feedback Greg! The “problem” with the ARM servers is that they are in Germany, meaning that the images need to be pulled to Germany first, built there, and sent back to the US for the rest of the journey, rather than just an intra-datacenter transfer for normal builds. Something of a drawback there for sure, but better than the occasional failed build with no way forward as things are now. We are also looking at ways of remedying this specific problem too, so hang in there